But after a year of letting the game consume her, Indendi wrestled with the idea that it was too much, that she needed to walk away.

It was only in leaving that she would find her way back, at Oregon State rather than George Fox, and reunite with the first coach who helped her believe in herself. And in finding an answer to the question that haunted her, the Livingston, Mont., native has rebuilt her life and learned lessons that are now helping her rebuild a program.

"It's like I had a mid-life crisis," Indendi said, "when I was 19."

"It was starting to dawn on me throughout the spring and summer that I'm disappearing as a person. I knew I needed to find other priorities, knew I needed to remove myself from basketball, and the only way to do that was to leave Fox."

So days before school started that August, Indendi sent the e-mail to Rueck and her teammates to tell them she was leaving. Afterward, she had nowhere to go until a friend from high school offered the last room in a house in Corvallis. She accepted and enrolled at Oregon State. For the first time in her life, she was without basketball, the one thing that mattered most in the past year.

"It was like I tripped, fell, hit my head, woke up and thought, 'Did I really just do that to myself?'" Indendi said. "'What the hell do I do now?'"

A chance, little more

A year later Indendi woke up with a crick in her neck and a stiff back. She rose, pulled on some clothes, grabbed her shoes and headed for the gym.

View full sizeBrian Feulner/Special to The OregonianIn her months away from basketball, Sage Indendi jumped headfirst into schoolwork, discovering she was a better student than she thought. She taught herself to cook, made friends outside of basketball. She developed deeper relationships with her parents and met her boyfriend.

Indendi returned to her home in Corvallis before school started with nothing more than the promise of a tryout. For the first time since leaving George Fox, the itch for basketball was coming back.

In the intervening months she had jumped headfirst into schoolwork, discovering she was a better student than she thought. She taught herself to cook, made friends outside of basketball. She developed deeper relationships with her parents. She met her boyfriend, Colin Donald, the first person since Knudson to challenge her.

"What Perry was for me that summer I left, I wanted to be that for someone else," Indendi says. "It made me wonder: Was I the person you wanted to confide in?"

She also lost all the muscle mass she had worked so hard for. "I didn't," she said, "feel like an athlete."

She also had kept her distance from Rueck, not sure how their relationship was supposed to work since she left. But he stayed in touch sporadically, hopeful that she would return to George Fox.

"My job was to be a stabilizing presence in her life, so I was committed to that," Rueck said. "I understood her decision from her perspective. I didn't like it, but I understood it. I kept that door open so that if she wanted to come back she could."

But before Indendi could ask to come back or Rueck could offer, the Oregon State women's program fell apart. Rueck, a Beavers alum, watched from 60 miles away as seven players left the team that spring and head coach LaVonda Wagner was eventually fired.

Amid the chaos, OSU athletic director Bob DeCarolis publicly joked that the Beavers, bereft of players, might be "handing out scholarships" next season.

"That was a green light for me," Indendi said. "Him saying that gave me a little bit of a push. Maybe it was an excuse to play again."

"Sage has a respect for the game, and she knows the game," Rueck said recently. "She's a basketball junkie. She knows a lot about everything. Playing against (Rutgers coach) Vivian Stringer, to some people, wouldn't be anything, she's just another coach. To Sage, she's a legend. So I knew how much that game meant to her.

"After the game, it didn't need to be said, it was unspoken: We all knew what we had done and who we had played, and that we had competed well with them. She had played well, and I said to her, 'Hey, I guess you ARE D-I.'"

If Indendi remains freaked out now, one day before Oregon State (8-14, 1-10 Pacific-10 Conference) hosts USC (13-8, 5-5) at Gill Coliseum, she doesn't show it. A starter in every game this season, Indendi has embraced her role as a much-needed scorer. In just 22 games she has hit 58 three-pointers, No. 5 all-time in Corvallis. Last Saturday in Seattle, Indendi hit five threes, scoring 17 points and helping OSU to its first conference win, a 51-46 victory over Washington.

That she is having success, and has been reunited with Rueck, comes as no surprise to B.B. Gardner, the point guard of Rueck's 2009 title team at George Fox.

"She told us she was never going to play again, but of course it would make sense that she would go play for Scott," Gardner said. "It's not a mistake that they ended up at the same place again."

Once lost with basketball and without it, Indendi said she now feels a peaceful balance, and counts her blessings that things worked out the way they did.

"I think Scott is to me what John Wooden was to Bill Walton and all those great players, what Geno Auriemma is to Maya Moore and Diana Taurasi: He's exactly the kind of person I want coaching me.